Archives for March 2016

Hermann Vogel’s Death of Spartacus, showing the Thracian gladiator’s capture, shortly before his crucifixion

Historical, mythical or legendary, the crucifixion of Christ represents the story of many. Whether or not the man called Jesus existed – and the modern scholarly view on this seems to range from ‘probably’ to ‘possibly’ – the gospel narrative reflects a wider human story, the story of thousands upon thousands of nameless and forgotten individuals who were crucified at the hands of the Roman state.

For anyone who assumes that crucifixion was an unusual or extraordinary event in Roman times, they should consider the case of the rebels led by Spartacus. This low-born Thracian gladiator-slave led a revolt so successful that it caused considerable embarrassment to the ruling Senate. When Crassus finally crushed the rebellion in 71 BCE, he ordered the crucifixion of an estimated 6,000 slave-rebels along the Appian Way, the main road leading out from the city of Rome; he also brought back the ruthless practice of decimation to punish and terrorise the cohort of soldiers that he deemed to have failed him the most in his earlier attempts to quash the rebellion.

Crucifixion was public and humiliating – deliberately so – and its use in the case of the slave-rebels illustrates several important points about this notorious and brutal method of execution. Its aim was to demean the victim and intimidate the observer – this was what happened to you when you challenged the Roman rule of law. Crucifixion was a servile supplicium – reserved for slaves and foreigners, non-Roman citizens, deserting soldiers, pirates and insurgents; wealthy Roman men were often removed from society due to political machinations or the whim of current authority, but never was crucifixion used to dispense with them.

In its broadest definition, crucifixion meant that the victim was impaled and/or tied to some form of frame, cross, stake or tree and left to hang for anything from several hours to several days. Causes of death included exhaustion and shock brought on by extreme pain and exsanguination (sometimes in part from a scourging prior to the crucifixion), heart failure and/or pulmonary collapse from the immense pressure put upon the victim’s heart and lungs; the victim’s demise could be hastened dramatically by increasing the intensity of this pressure, hence the common practice of breaking the legs to precipitate collapse. It was a sadistic and grotesque formula for murder, exploited in extremis by the Romans.

It is not clear whether the emperor Constantine outlawed crucifixion in the 4th Century CE, as is claimed by Christian triumphalist writers, but certainly it had been outlawed in the Roman empire by the mid 5th century. However, the Classical world is not the only context in which this abhorrent method of slaughter has been practised. Japanese haritsuke started with the execution of 26 Christians in Nagasaki in 1597 and recurred intermittently up until the last century. Islam has also subsumed the practice, with verse 5:33 of the Qur’an calling for the crucifixion of those who wage war against Allah or the Prophet. Crucifixion is still practised in some Islamic countries and there have been recently documented cases in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen; it is most commonly used to make a degrading and threatening showpiece of the victim’s body rather than as a method of execution, but this is not exclusively the case.

‘The Easter story means nothing to a humanist from a spiritual perspective… Yet each year the human side of the Easter story can serve as a sober reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.’

The Easter story means nothing to a humanist from a spiritual perspective; we do not believe that Christ was the son of God, nor do we believe that he died for our sins and was resurrected. Yet each year the human side of the Easter story can serve as a sober reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. In a modern context, we can and should take action by giving support to the work of organisations such as Amnesty International, who campaign tirelessly and effectively against the use of torture and capital punishment right across the globe.

But as a Classicist, I cannot help but see the story of Christ as a legend within its ancient milieu and recall the incalculable number of wasted human lives that resonate through its narrative. In the name of Roman civilisation, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were tortured and crucified, forgotten souls with no afforded legacy of reverence or pious gratitude to preserve them in the conscious minds of the living.

So when I received an invitation from the ‘World Congress of Faiths’ to their conference in Salisbury in January 2016 I welcomed it – another sign that humanists and Humanism are being recognised as constructive players in the wider religion and belief landscape. Afterwards they asked me to do a post for their blog and a longer piece for their journal. Here’s the blog post.

—Jeremy Rodell, BHA Dialogue Officer

Dialogue with religious believers can be tricky. First we have to get past difficult terms like ‘spirituality’ – or at least find useful meanings for them. Photo: Mitchell Joyce/Flickr.

‘Spiritual’ is a word most humanists avoid because of its lack of definition and its religious and pseudo-scientific connotations. And most humanists feel alienated by the word ‘faith’, regarding it as synonymous with ‘religion’ and ‘belief in the absence of evidence’. So a World Congress of Faiths conference titled Promoting spiritual life: an interfaith perspective was not my natural habitat.

On the other hand, I have had enough ‘interfaith’ experience – yes, that’s another alienating term – to know that the people involved are almost always friendly and interesting. This event was no exception and I felt welcome. My concerns about the relevance to me of substance of the conference were largely dispelled by the opening talk, An overview of current approaches to spirituality, by the Revd Canon James Woodward, Principal of Sarum College. He emphasised both that he did not know whether ‘spirituality’ was valid concept – referring to it as a ‘Polyfilla’ word – and that, as far as British Christianity in its present institutional form was concerned: ‘It is over’. That put paid to some of my preconceptions!

As Charles Clarke and Linda Woodhead say in the introduction to their 2015 paper on Religious Education ‘The last twenty-five years have witnessed some of the most significant shifts in religious belief and practice since the Reformation’. There is a rapidly emerging new British landscape in which the majority has no religious identity (already about 50% according to the British Social Attitudes survey). Many – probably most – of them are atheistic, while among the religious minority, forms of faith that are ‘stronger’ than traditional Anglicanism – especially non-denominational, notably Pentecostal, Christianity and Islam – start to predominate. I think both religious people and humanists have a common interest in helping ensure that the outcome of this huge transition is a harmonious, well-integrated (and, I would argue, secular) plurality.

However, whether we are religious or non-religious, we are all human beings with inner lives. One of the growing areas for attention by the BHA is Pastoral Support for non-religious people in hospitals and prisons. Humanists who do this work are usually embedded in chaplaincy teams and are, of course, dealing with the same type of human issues and concerns as their religious colleagues. I think this sense of ‘spiritual’ was what Dr Desmond Biddulph, President of the Buddhist Society (and a psychiatrist), was talking about in How can faiths work together to promote the value of spirituality? But I couldn’t share all of his Buddhist perspective, or the implication that the majority who are not of ‘faith’ have no part to play in helping people who need the support of an independent fellow human being. Nevertheless, in this sense of acknowledging, supporting and perhaps developing both the human inner life and our shared humanity, there is plenty of common ground.

Similarly, some humanists have, to varying degrees, uplifting experiences associated with being part of a greater whole/transcendence or even ‘near death’ or other ‘spiritual’ experiences of the type described by Marianne Rankin, Director of Communications for The Alister Hardy Trust, in The personal experience of the spiritual: its variety and commonalities. The difference is not in the subjective experience itself, which can be profound, but whether it is – to use Dr Alan Race’s term – ’embodied’, a manifestation of the brain, its chemistry and its response to stimulae, upbringing and wider society, or whether it is a manifestation of a soul and a ‘spiritual realm’ – physical versus non-physical. It was notable that Marianne Rankin’s talk did not deal with that. Perhaps wrongly, I had the impression that the Alister Hardy Trust’s library of experiences is seen as evidence in support of the ‘spiritual realm’ hypothesis, or at least that it is built on the premise that the hypothesis is true. Of course, I would point to the extensive, and growing, body of evidence for the ‘embodied’ hypothesis, and the lack of any scientifically objective evidence for the ‘spiritual realm’ hypothesis. But that difference of view does not make the subjective experiences themselves any less powerful or less universal.

In Integrating spirituality into the public realm, Dr Jonathan Rowson, former Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts, was content to use the term spirituality without the distraction of defining it. He argued that ‘spirituality’ is nothing if it is not ‘transformative’ and that meaningful transformation is not in the realm of inner contemplation, but rather should be a driver for political action to improve life for other people. For him, climate change was top of the priority list. There is no doubt that many religious people are driven to do good works by their beliefs. But, as a humanist, I do not accept the principle that somehow subjective ‘spiritual’ experience ‘ought’ to be transformative. Nor do I like the idea of invoking ‘spirituality’ to legitimise political action – just look at the US Christian Right or Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. And I feel very uncomfortable if ‘spiritual’ motivations are elevated above other types of motivation, such as simply thinking that something is ethically right because it makes the world a better place. Many people of faith and many humanists are interested in similar areas of social and political concern – there is undoubtedly common ground here. But why bring ‘spirituality’ into it?

In response to my concerns about the ‘bagginess’ of ‘spiritual’ as a term, James Woodward challenged me to come up with an alternative and to say what I thought the meanings were. I readily admitted that I do not know of another word. But to me it is used to refer to:

our inner human lives, including our sense of meaning and purpose;

specific types of subjective experience usually described using words such as ‘transcendent’, or ‘connectedness’, ranging from the mundane to ‘peak experiences’;

the manifestation of a real but non-physical ‘spiritual’ realm to which some people attribute these types of subjective experiences – the territory often claimed by religion.

The woolliness of the term is illustrated by Ofsted in their definition of schools’ Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development (SMSC): ‘Explore beliefs and experience; respect faiths, feelings and values; enjoy learning about oneself, others and the surrounding world; use imagination and creativity; reflect’.

The conference did not reduce my misgivings about ‘spiritual’ and ‘spirituality’. On the other hand, I encountered interesting people and became aware of the wide spectrum of views and academic work taking place in this area. Some of the issues covered by the conference are important aspects of the human condition.

As the transition to a plural society with a non-religious majority and a varied religious minority moves further forward, we all have a role in ensuring they are not neglected. There will inevitably be areas of disagreement, along with plenty of common ground. Dialogue is the best way to map out and understand the territory.